The Obama administration has directed agencies to go through their budgets line by line to identify the programs and subprograms that have the lowest impact on agency missions and constitute at least 5 percent of their discretionary budget totals provided for fiscal 2012 in the fiscal 2011 budget – in order to cut them.
A memo from OMB and the White House says that current spending levels and projections are unsustainable and that the 5-percent cuts are intended to help meet a goal of freezing non-security funding for three years.
According to the memo — M-10-20 –both security and non-security agencies must undertake the review and while mandatory programs are excluded from the 5 percent total, agencies are being asked to separately list low-impact mandatory programs as part of their budget submissions.
In selecting programs to cull agencies should consider whether the program has an unclear or duplicative purpose, uncertain federal role, completed mission, or lack of demonstrated effectiveness; presidential or otherwise White House sponsored government-wide initiatives don’t qualify.
Agencies should disregard statutory, regulatory, or administrative challenges to actually eliminating or reducing a program, and focus entirely on the extent to which the program advances an agency’s mission, OMB said.
It said the purpose of the exercise is to identify low-impact programs rather than find ways to reach a 5 percent reduction with across-the-board reductions or incremental savings in administrative costs.
